Friday January 27, 2017

HardOCP broke the story of NVIDIA moving into the retail video card market back in 2010. Since then, NVIDIA has gone on to move more into the retail market with it Founders Edition cards, and that certainly has gotten a lot of attention last year with the Pascal launch. A couple days ago, Digitimes reported that brisk sales of Founders Edition cards was going to impact NVIDIA partners, which is very likely true. This Seeking Alpha editorial just came through my box and it seemed to round out the week's NVDIA discussion, however Motek Moyen is arguing that NVIDIA competing with its partners will help improve designs. Now considering that Moyen references "Ryzen GPU chips" in his analysis, you have to wonder if he knows WTF he is talking about. So....come on Vega and Volta!

Gaff aside, the likes of ASUS, GIGABYTE, and MSI have not exactly been sitting around with a thumb up their collective butts when it comes to excellent in-house video card design for years and years now. So all in all, I don't think Moyen knows what he is actually talking about, at least as far as his headline goes. Founders Edition cards sales in no way push better designs from NVDIA partners, as the FE cards sell in a more front-loaded fashion anyway. FE only truly impacts their reference card sales is how I see it. ASUS, GIGABYTE, and MSI need to just keep on doing what they have been doing.